AP Photo

I still remember seeing him in my parents' garden, fresh from a trek from hell, running for his life. What remains seared in my memory is how swollen his feet were — covered in sores and too big to fit inside a new pair of shoes without causing him more pain than he could bear. It was the summer of 1992, and the young man I shall call Sasha, then barely 18, had walked from Sarajevo to Italy, in a roundabout way that took him through central Europe and Austria. His younger brother had arrived earlier with his mother, before civilisation abandoned their native Sarajevo and Yugoslavia, their country of birth, which was vanishing on the TV screens before their eyes. They had come because the younger boy had been diagnosed with bone cancer at 14. My hometown, Bologna, is the home of...